Please join us for the Awards celebration on Saturday, February 15, 2014 in Chicago, Illinois. The celebration will be held during the annual Women’s Caucus for Art and College Art Association conferences. The awards ceremony, open free of charge to the public, will take place from 6:00 -7:30pm followed by a ticketed Gala from 8:00-10:00 pm at the Museum of Contemporary Art, 220 E. Chicago Ave, Chicago. The ticketed Gala will include a walk-around gourmet dinner, open bar, and the opportunity to congratulate the awardees.

2014 WCA Lifetime Award Recipients

Phyllis Bramson is an artist and educator. Her recent works use folly and innuendo as narrative tactics to embody exaggerated fictions about love. Infused with amusing anecdotes about life’s imperfections, her sensuous paintings are miniaturized schemes meandering between love, desire, pleasure, tragedy and cosmic disorder. She received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and taught for 22 years at the University of Illinois, Chicago, where she is now professor emerita. Since 2007, she has advised MFA students at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Bramson is a recipient of numerous awards and grants including National Endowments, a Fulbright Scholarship, Louis Comfort Tiffany Grant, Guggenheim Fellowship, Rockefeller Foundation Grant, and Anonymous Was A Woman Award. Bramson has had over 30 solo exhibitions in institutions such as the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, Cultural Center of Chicago, Boulder Art Museum, the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, and the Art Museum of West Virginia University. Her works have been included in group exhibitions at the Seattle Art Museum, Art Institute of Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Smart Museum, Renwick Museum, Corcoran Museum, and Aspen Art Museum. In 2013, Bramson will have solo exhibitions at Zolla/Lieberman Gallery in Chicago and at Littlejohn Contemporary in New York City. Bramson was selected for the Annual Distinguished Artist interviews during the College Art Associations Annual Conference in Chicago in 2010, and in 2012 she received the Distinguished Artist of the Year/Chicago from The Union League Club of Chicago. Bramson is represented by: Zolla/Lieberman Gallery; Printworks, Chicago; Philip Slein Gallery, St Louis; and Littlejohn Contemporary, New York.

Harmony Hammond is an artist, writer and educator. Hammond was a leading figure in the feminist art movement in New York in the early 1970s, co-founding A.I.R., the first women’s cooperative art gallery in New York, and the journal, Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art & Politics. Her earliest feminist work combined gender politics with post-minimal concerns of materials and process, frequently occupying a space between painting and sculpture. Since 1984, Hammond has lived and worked in northern New Mexico. She taught at the University of Arizona, Tucson from 1998–2006. Hammond’s artwork has been exhibited in national and international venues including the New Museum, Brooklyn Museum, MoMA PS1, Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, National Museum of Women in the Arts, Walker Art Center, American Center in Paris, and the Neue Galerie in Graz, Germany. Her artwork was featured in the major exhibitions High Times, Hard Times: New York Painting 1967–1975 and WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution and is in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Walker Art Center, Brooklyn Museum, National Museum of Women in the Arts, and Art Institute of Chicago. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim, Joan Mitchell, Pollock–Krasner, Esther and Adolph Gottlieb and Art Matters Foundations; the New York State Council on the Arts; and the National Endowment for the Arts. Hammond’s book, Wrappings: Essays on Feminism, Art and the Martial Arts is a seminal publication on 1970s feminist art and her book Lesbian Art in America: A Contemporary History received a Lambda Literary Award. In 2013, Hammond was honored with The College Art Association Distinguished Feminist Award. Hammond is represented by Alexander Gray Associates in New York City.

Adrian Margaret Smith Piper is a conceptual artist and analytic philosopher. She received a BA in philosophy with a minor in medieval and renaissance musicology from the City College of New York and a Ph.D. in philosophy from Harvard University. Piper became the first tenured African American woman professor in the field of philosophy. For her refusal to return to the United States while listed as a Suspicious Traveler on the U.S. Transportation Security Administration’s Watch List, Wellesley College forcibly terminated her tenured full professorship in philosophy in 2008. In 2011, the American Philosophical Association awarded her the title of Professor Emeritus. Piper’s two-volume, open access study in Kantian metaethics, Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Volume I: The Humean Conception and Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Volume II: A Kantian Conception, was accepted for publication by Cambridge University Press in 2008 and praised as “groundbreaking,” “brilliant,” “indispensable,” and “original and important.” Piper introduced issues of race and gender into the vocabulary of conceptual art and explicit political content into minimalism. In 2000, she further expanded the vocabulary of conceptual art to include Vedic philosophical imagery and concepts. Her artwork has enjoyed numerous national and international traveling retrospectives, and is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, Centre Pompidou, and Generali Foundation in Vienna, among others. Piper has been the recipient of grants, fellowships and awards including a Guggenheim, AVA, NEA, NEH, Andrew Mellon, Woodrow Wilson, Skowhegan Medal, New York Dance & Performance Award, and the College Art Association Artist Award. Piper lives and works in Berlin, where she runs the APRA Foundation Berlin.

Faith Wilding is an intermedia artist, writer and educator. She is professor emerita of performance art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, a graduate faculty member at Vermont College of Fine Arts, and currently a visiting scholar at the Pembroke Center, Brown University. Born in Paraguay, Wilding received her BA from the University of Iowa and MFA from the California Institute of Arts. Wilding was a co-initiator of the Feminist Art Programs in Fresno and at Cal Arts and key contributor to the Womanhouse exhibition with “Crocheted Environment” and her “Waiting” performance. Her work with the feminist art movement in Southern California was chronicled initially in her book, By Our Own Hands, and later in The Power of Feminist Art, edited by Norma Broude and Mary Garrard. Wilding's work addresses the recombinant and distributed biotech body in various 2D media, audio, video, digital media, installations, and performances. Her artwork has been featured in major feminist exhibitions including WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution; Sexual Politics; Division of Labor: Women’s Work in Contemporary Art; and re.act Feminism. She has exhibited nationally and internationally, including the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid; Centre for Contemporary Art in Glasgow; MoMA PS1 and the Bronx Museum of Art in New York; Museum of Contemporary Art and Armand Hammer Museum in Los Angeles; UC Riverside Museum of Art; the Singapore Art Museum; and many others. Wilding co-founded and collaborates with subRosa, a cyberfeminist cell of cultural producers using BioArt and tactical performance in the public sphere to explore and critique the intersections of information and biotechnologies in women's bodies, lives, and work, and she is the co-editor of Domain Errors! Cyberfeminist Practices! She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, Creative Capital grant, and NEA artist awards.

2014 President’s Awardees for Art & Activism

Janice Nesser-Chu is an educator and a mixed media artist who is an activist in the arts community. Her life’s work is centered on social activism, education, mentorship and promotion of women in the arts. Nesser-Chu serves on the national board of the Women’s Caucus for Art (WCA) as the Legacy Campaign Director, on the WCA St. Louis, MO chapter board, and on the board of directors for ArtTable. She was the WCA President from 2010-12 and has served on the WCA board of directors for over eight years. She coordinated the 2011 Art & Social Justice Conference and sat on the advisory board and steering committee for the 2012 Cross-Cultural Engagement: Building a Diverse and Dynamic Community Conference, both in St. Louis. She recently served on the Forums Committee for Art St. Louis and is a founder and past board member of the Northern Arts Council. Nesser-Chu is the chair of the Arts & Humanities Department and a professor of art at St. Louis Community College-Florissant Valley. Prior to accepting the Chair position, she served as the Director of the Galleries and Permanent Collection and Coordinator of the Photography Program. Nesser-Chu established the Women's History Month (WHM) and World AIDS Day/Quilt display programs on the campus and continues to serve as the coordinator for WHM. She has a Masters degree in art from Webster University and a BA in journalism with a minor in political science from St. Mary of the Woods College. Nesser-Chu has exhibited nationally and internationally for over 20 years and her work is included in many permanent collections.

Hye-Seong Tak Lee of Gwangju, South Korea is an artist, curator and lecturer. While residing in various cities in North America over a ten-year period, she was active in immigrant communities, helping emerging artists enrich their environment through multicultural exhibitions. Since returning to South Korea, she has worked with expatriate artists to broaden her country’s cultural tolerance and expand the society of artists through events such as art classes, workshops, mural projects, and exhibitions. Lee is particularly determined to expand the visibility of women artists in Korea, whose accomplishments have been all but ignored because of the country’s focus on other significant democratic issues. In partnership with the International Caucus of the Women’s Caucus for Art (WCA), she mounted the 2012 Woman + Body exhibition in Seoul and Gwangju, a survey of contemporary sexual personae—female, transgender, and male. The Women + Body exhibition raised questions about stereotypes and prejudice, presented diverse points of view, and showcased significant Korean activist women artists spanning several generations, together with WCA activist women artists from across the US. Lee also participated in panel discussions related to gender policies and lectured on the contributions of women in the arts. Woman + Body opened the door for strengthening and widening women artists’ networks for both Koreans and Americans. Lee looks forward to curating more exhibitions with talented women artists from all over the world.